Thursday, July 17, 2014

I actually agree with Pat Buchanan over Thom Hartmann on this. And I disagree with Thom Hartmann on a lot because he is so far out in left field that it would be impossible to hit a home run out at that ballpark at least to left field. You would need a jet plane to fly the baseball and drop it over the wall at that ballpark. But I agree with Pat Buchanan as much as it snows in Los Angeles. Because he is so far to the right that he makes the Islamic theocrats in Iran look moderate. But I probably agree with Hartmann more often than Buchanan on most civil liberties issues like the War on Drugs.

And this is why I agree with Buchanan here. Because as much as the far-left likes to paint Richard Nixon as some type of right-wing authoritarian with the illegal bugging and other criminal activities inside of the White House, Dick Nixon was actually pretty moderate or progressive even as it related to civil rights issues. And even consumer and workers protections is it related to the environment and civil rights. As Mr. Buchanan said Mr. Nixon was way ahead of the Southern Caucus in the Democratic Party on civil and equal rights and supported all of the civil rights bills of the 1950s and 60s. And even supported affirmative action in the 1970s.

The death nail and actual fall of liberalism once you start talking about nationalizing the media. Because there is nothing liberal about state-control and monopoly of how the people get their media and other information. You have to know if you don't already that Free Speech and Freedom of the Press are liberal values and ideas. Its authoritarians either far-left like in Cuba and Venezuela, or the far-right in the Middle East that want to control the media. So they can control what their people hear and not get hurt by that information.

I understand the power of big media especially once it becomes too big and too powerful and starts looking like a monopoly. But that is what anti-trust and anti-monopoly laws are for. Once a company becomes too big as far as how much control they have over the private market the answer is to break them up. The answer is competition, not going from a private monopoly and creating some new state monopoly where now the people in official power can control how we get our information. And even protecting themselves from negative information that can hurt them.